I Love Dick (24 page)

Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman, 1980: [Because Hannah Wilke's art] “has no theory of the representations of women, it presents images of women as unproblematic. It does not take into account the social contradictions of ‘femininity'.” (
Screen
: 35–39)

Catherine Liu, 1989: “Wilke is well known for appearing nude in her work. She projects a hippylike comfort with her own nakedness. But her self exposure, which translates as some kind of rhetoric of sexual freedom for women, is too facile, too simple a formulation. The work of artists like Cindy Sherman and Aimee Rankin has shown female sexuality to be the site of as much pain as pleasure.” (
Artforum
12/89)

“Because we rejected a certain kind of theoretical language, people just assumed that we were dumb,” the poet Alice Notley said to me in Paris last year. Hannah Wilke spent a great deal of energy throughout her life trying to prove that she was right. If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too. Dear Dick, That's what I realized when I fell in love with you.

“Of course, Hannah did become a monster,” I said to Warren Niesluchowski. Warren's a friend, an artworld personality and critic, a smart and cultivated guy. We were sitting on Mike Kelley's patio at a barbecue, catching up on news. Warren knows everyone in the artworld. He'd known Hannah since they met in 1975 at the Soho restaurant Food.

Warren chuckled. “Yes, she did. But of the wrong kind. Not a monster on the order of Picasso, or—” (and here he named several other famous males). “The problem was, she started taking everything so personally. She refused to take a leap of faith. Her work was no longer art.”

In 1985 Claes Oldenburg threatened an injunction against the University of Missouri Press. They were preparing a book of Hannah Wilke's work and writings to accompany her first major retrospective.

In order to protect his “privacy,” Claes Oldenburg demanded that the following items be removed: 1) a photograph from
Advertisements For Living
that depicted Claes together with Hannah's eight year old niece. 2) Any mention of his name in Hannah's writings. 3) Reproduction of a collaborative poster, Artists Make Toys. 4) Quotations from a correspondence between him and Hannah that was a part of Hannah Wilke's text,
I Object
.

Claes' fame and the University's unwillingness to defend her made it possible for Oldenburg to erase a huge portion of Hannah Wilke's life.
Eraser, Erase-her
—the title of one of Wilke's later works.

I explained to Warren about the difference between male and female monsters. “Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reason why.”

Monstrosity: the self as a machine.
The Blob
, mindlessly swallowing and engorging, rolling down the supermarket aisle absorbing pancake mix and jello and everyone in town. Unwise and unstoppable. The horror of
The Blob
is a horror of the fearless. To become
The Blob
requires a certain force of will.

Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.

Love,
Chris

ADD IT UP

Eagle Rock, Los Angeles

July 6, 1995

Dear Dick,

Last weekend I went up to Morro Bay and dropped acid for the first time in twenty years. The night before I'd dreamt about poverty. No matter what the rich may say, poverty is not just lack, it's a gestalt, a psychological condition.

I dreamt about Renee Mosher, an artist-carpenter-tattooist who lives in upstate New York, the Town of Thurman, the same town she was born in. Renee has two grown daughters who she's raised alone. She's 39 or so and in the dream just like in life, she looked old and frightening. In the dream we were best friends, we told each other everything. But waking up, the impossibility of it—returning to an adolescent state where you choose your friends for who they are, and not their circumstances—flooded through me like bad blood. When you're old, essentialism dies. You are your circumstances. Renee's house is getting repossessed next month because she hasn't paid her taxes for three years. Notices pile up, sometimes she opens them. And what's the point of even trying? Even if she finds a way to pay, the taxes'll just add up again. She can't afford to keep the house. She'll move into a trailer. She'll walk away. A blood vessel burst in Renee's eye while she was installing a kitchen window at my house. The doctor at the clinic said it was her gall bladder. That cost her 60 dollars. When Renee gets sick she misses work and loses pay. The poor do not write faxes, hire lawyers or cut backtax deals with Warren County. They get sick, they feel crazed, they walk away.

“Rich people are just poor people with money,” my socialite boss said 15 years ago in New York. But it's not true. There is a culture of poverty and it's not bridgeable.

John & Trevor'd travelled with a Warirapa shearing gang in the North Island of New Zealand since September. The job was lucrative and hard: start at 5, knock off at 5, seven days a week unless it rained. All spring long John and Trevor talked about the trip they'd take at Christmas when the job ran out. They'd put John's ‘61 V-8 Holden on the road and take off on a drinking/driving/whoring tour around New Zealand. They talked about the trip so much we all felt like we were going, too. They left Pahiatua on Christmas Eve. But on Boxing Day the car got totalled in a drunken wreck. They spent all the shearing money that they'd saved just paying off the bondsman.

“The most important entitlement,” I think you wrote, “remains the right to speak from a position.”

The acid came from San Francisco and it was nice in a California kind of way. Mustard sunlight reflected like a digital display over splashing waves; tall seagrass dancing in the dunes. Is poverty the absence of association? LSD unlocks the freeze-frame mechanism behind our eyes, lets us see that matter's always moving. Or so they say. But I was conscious while the grass and clouds were pleasurably roiling that they'd only be roiling in this way for seven hours. Unlike all the famous California acidheads, I was disappointed, underwhelmed, because drug-induced hallucinations are so visual and temporal.

What're pictures compared to living's endless tunnels, poverty grief & sadness? To experience intensity is to not know how things will end. This morning a Vietnam vet living with a hoard of dirty kids in a shack next to the Eagle Rock dry cleaners offered me 2000 dollars on the spot for my 1000 dollar car. Why? Because it (a 1967 Rambler) reminded him of his dead mother, the car she used to drive. We grasp at symbols, talismans, triggers of association to what's forever gone.

(For years I tried to write but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position. And “who” “am” “I”? Embracing you & failure's changed all that 'cause now I know I'm no one. And there's a lot to say…)

I want to write to you about schizophrenia—(“The schizophrenic believes that he is no-one,” R.D. Laing)—even though I haven't got a wooden leg to stand on in relation to this subject, having never studied it or experienced it firsthand. But I'm using you to create a certain schizophrenic atmosphere, OR, love is schizophrenia, OR, I felt a schizophrenic trigger in our confluence of interests—who's crazier than who? Schizophrenia's a state that I've been drawn to like a faghag since age 16. “Why are all the people I love crazy?” went a punk rock song by Ann Rower. For years I was the best friend, confidante, of schizophrenics. I lived through them, they talked to me. In New Zealand and New York, Ruffo, Brian, Erje and Michelle, Liza, Debbe, Dan were conduits for getting closer. But since these friendships always end with disappearances, guns and thefts and threats, by the time we met I'd given up.

When I asked you if you'd been to school you acted like I'd asked you if you still liked fucking pigs. “Of
course
I've been to school.” After all, your current job depends on it. But I could tell from all the footnotes in your writing that you hadn't. You like books too much and think they are your friends. One book leads you to the next like serial monogamy. Dear Dick, I've never been to school but every time I go into a library I get a rush like sex or acid for the first few minutes when you're getting off. My brain gets creamy with associative thought. Here are some notes I made about schizophrenia:

1. Sylvano Arieti writes in
The Interpretation of Schizophrenia
that schizophrenics operate within the realm of “paleologic”: a thought-system that insists against all rationality that “A” can be both “A” and “not-A” simultaneously. If LSD reveals movement, schizophrenia reveals content, i.e., patterns of association. Schizophrenics reach past language's “signifying chain,” (Lacan) into the realm of pure coincidence. Time spreads out in all directions. To experience time this way is to be permanently stoned on a drug that combines the visual effects of LSD with heroin's omnipotence, lucidity. Like in a Borges world, where one moment can unfold into a universe. In 1974 Brion Gysin and William Burroughs recorded their experiments in time-travel via an awareness of coincidence in
The Third Mind
. It's a self-help book. By following their methods (e.g., “Divide a notebook into three columns. Record at any given moment what you're doing, what you're thinking, what you're reading…”) anyone can do this, i.e., can leave them “selves” and enter fractured time.

2. Ruffo was a 42-year-old man waiting to receive a full-frontal lobotomy in Wellington, New Zealand. He was an unmistakable sight in Wellington's limited cast of “characters”—big and bear-like, tufts of straight black hair, bad teeth, broad smile, an energy and openness behind brown eyes that wasn't English, wasn't “European.” No matter what the season Ruffo wore a brown tweed overcoat wrapped around him like a cassock over sharkskin pants. Diagnosed incurable by New Zealand's Mental Health, Ruffo was the most civil kind of “schizophrenic.” He never raved; in fact, he never spoke without considering the impact of his words with exquisite care. While privately he may have been delusional, Ruffo wasn't bent on delivering any particular message. He'd discovered no conspiracies, and if voices spoke to him from radios, TVs or trees, he never translated them. His friends were his constituents, but unlike other politicians Ruffo was supremely patient. If plans were being made for him, perhaps they were for his own good. The Social Welfare agency that sent him checks hoped that once relieved of half a brain, Ruffo would become employable and self-supporting. He had no bitterness about this.

Southerly winds and rain pelted Wellington for six months of the year. Winters were gargantuan and mythic. Some years guide-ropes were installed downtown so that the city's lighter residents would not be swept away: thin people in oilskin parkas floating over cars on Taranaki Street, drifting like balloons from the city to the harbor, clear across the Cook Strait to the South Island above the Picton Perry. Every year or so an article by a distinguished cultural celebrity (a writer or a broadcaster who'd travelled “overseas”) would appear in the
New Zealand Listener
likening Wellington to London or Manhattan. The entire city was delusional.

Sometimes after the floods a fine sparkling day would crack out of nowhere like the 8th Day of Creation, and these were days Ruffo would emerge in his overcoat from his bed-sit on Ohaka Terrace like an animal from its lair. I always felt better after running into him. Unlike most people in this self-consciously provincial burg, Ruffo was intelligent and curious. When he looked, he really saw you. His was a civilizing presence, transforming Wellington into Joyce's Dublin.

If Ruffo trusted you, he'd invite you to his room, a bedsit carved out downstairs of a woodframe house that the landlord must've abandoned years ago to Social Welfare. You reach it walking down a brambly rutted concrete path. In fact Ruffo was a gifted artist. Hardly anyone in New Zealand at that time painted without institutional sanction, three years of art school, then a gallery, but Ruffo did: he painted silkscreens, stagesets, cartoon-posters for his friends with theater groups and bands.

Back in Wellington years later, I learned that Ruffo had been blessed eight years ago with the lobotomy and he was still in town. In fact, he had a show up at the Willis Street Community Center Gallery. I used the money that I'd made from talking at the university about the semi-names I'd worked with in New York to buy my favorite. In it, an '80s-style Babbitt in a nice gray suit grins into a receiver at the red phonebox on the corner of Aro Street and Ohaka Terrace. The mouthpiece is a human ear. The street is a cacophony of traffic but there's still a faint mangle of bush peeping out through all the blobby colored cars. Yellow clouds stretch out across a blue-pink mackerel sky. In Ruffo's postmodern Wellington, One Dimensional Man still meets Katherine Mansfield.

The privilege of visiting Ruffo was always mixed, a little bit, with sadness. His basement room was dark and strewn with garbage. Digging through newspapers and dirty clothes to make a pot of tea, Ruffo never put an optimistic cast on things. He was a schizophrenic realist. He never had false hopes about an art career. If he was feeling really bad he'd disappear, not be at home, but he was never mean. Visits proceeded according to his rules, along a Continental model. He didn't talk about himself, he didn't pry into your life or problems. Visiting him was like travelling in another country. I didn't mind this 'cause I wanted him to teach me how to be. I loved him. I was 16 and a foreigner.

3. According to David Rosenhan, schizophrenia is a self-fulfilling diagnosis. In his experiment, eight sane people gained admission to psychiatric hospitals by claiming to hear voices. Though from that point on they acted “normally,” the staff used everything they said and did as proof of the original “psychosis.”

4. Since schizophrenics are at home in multiple realities, contradictions don't apply to them. Like cubist chemists, they break things down and rearrange the elements.

5. I like the phrase “paleologic” because it sounds Egyptian. At the end of
AC/DC
, a play by Heathcote Williams, the character Perowne performs an operation known as self-trepanning. Perowne, a vagrant mathematician, just gets bored by all the sex & mindfuck antics of his druggie friends. Because he doesn't pine for “human warmth” he doesn't dabble in psychology. Perowne's more interested in the flow of systems. Trepanning, as pioneered in London by Bart Hughes and Amanda Fielding, entails the drilling of a hole inside the skull. Bleeding from the wound expands the capillaries around the trepan-subject's pituitary gland. The Third Eye opens. I don't know how they figure out the spot or the exact depth of the incision, but Amanda Fielding made a movie where she does it to herself in a kitchen. And in the play, when finally Perowne trepans himself, his speech explodes. He rants, he sings in hieroglyphics.

6. Félix Guattari, co-author with Gilles Deleuze of
Anti-Oedipus
—
Capitalism and Schizophrenia
, objected to Arieti's use of the word “paleologic” in describing schizophrenia. “Paleologic,” Félix said once, “implies returning to a vague primeval state. But on the contrary—schizophrenia is highly organized.” Félix of course was expanding on his analogy between capitalism and schizophrenia. Both are complex systems based on paradox in which disconnected parts operate according to hidden laws. Both rationalize fragmentation. Capitalism's ethics are completely schizophrenic; i.e., they're contradictory and duplicitous. Buy Cheap, Sell Dear. Psychiatry tries its hardest to conceal this, tracing all disturbances back to the Holy Triangle of Mommy-Daddy-Me. “The unconscious needs to be created,” Félix wrote in
Mary Barnes' Trip
. A brilliant model.

Still, Perowne's gentleness reminded me of Ruffo's.

7. Schizophrenia consists of placing the word “therefore” between two non-sequiturs. Driving up to Bishop last week I had two beliefs: I wouldn't get a speeding ticket; I will die within the next five years. I didn't get a speeding ticket, therefore—

(When your head's exploding with ideas you have to find a reason. Therefore, scholarship and research are forms of schizophrenia. If reality's unbearable and you don't want to give up you have to understand the patterns. “Schizophrenia,” Géza Róheim wrote, “is the magical psychosis.” A search for proof. An orgy of coincidences.)

Two hours ago I took a break from writing this to take a walk before the sun went down. I had an urge to play Willie Nelson's “Crazy” on the
Red Hot Country
CD before going out, but didn't. When I turned the bend on 49th Terrace, my usual walk,
Crazy
sung by Patsy Cline was pouring, I mean
POURING
, out the windows of a house. I leaned back against a fence across the street and watched the house lift off. An operatic, cinematic moment, everything locked into a single frame that gets you high. Oh Dick, I want to be an intellectual like you.

8. Do you remember that night in February at your house while you were making dinner, I told you how I'd become a vegetarian? I was at a dinner at Félix's loft with Sylvère. The Berlin Wall had just come down. He, Félix and Tony Negri and François, a younger follower of Félix's in French broadcasting, were planning a TV panel show about the “future of the left.” Sylvère would moderate a live discussion between Félix and Tony and the German playwright Heiner Müller. They needed one more speaker. It seemed strange that people would be interested in any conversation between such a homogenous crew: four straight white European men in their 50s, all divorced and now with childless younger women in their early 30s. Sometimes coincidence is just depressingly inevitable. No matter what these four men say, it's like they've already said it. In Félix's book
Chaosophy
there's a great discussion on schizophrenia between him, Deleuze, and eight of France's leading intellectuals. All of them are men. If we want reality to change then why not change it? Oh Dick, deep down I feel that you're utopian too.